The Sound of Shakespeare by Folkerth Wes;

Author:Folkerth, Wes;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1702123
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

The receptive ear in Coriolanus

Among the associations ears have in the early modern period is that they are pregnable, and therefore potential targets of violent attack. This is especially apparent in Shakespeare’s works. The ears are specified as sites of extreme vulnerability in almost every one of the major tragedies. No doubt the most famous instance occurs in Hamlet, where the king is poisoned through the “porches” of his ears with a “leprous distillment” (1.5.63–4). The ears are uncontrolled orifices, dangerously exposed at all times to possible contamination by the introduction of an infectious or poisonous agent. R.R. Simpson has suggested that the precise method of Hamlet Senior’s murder is based on contemporary reports of a similar homicide in the court of the Medicis by a physician, named Gonzago.6 Although the agent that threatens the ear can be physical, as in Hamlet, Shakespeare is more likely to imagine the infection or poison as verbal. When Iago confides that he’ll “pour this pestilence into his [Othello’s] ear,” when Lady Macbeth, reading her husband’s letter, conjures him to return home swiftly, ‘that I may pour my spirits in thine ear’, or when Pisanio reacts to the letter from Posthumous in Cymbeline’s third act, exclaiming ‘Leonatus! / O master, what a strange infection / Is fall’n into thy ear! What false Italian / (As poisonous tongu’d as handed) hath prevail’d / On thy too ready hearing?’, the pestilence, spirits, and infection are all figures for contaminating discourse (Oth. 2.3.356; Mac. 1.5.26; Cym. 3.2.2–6). A related example in which the ear is figured as the victim of violent penetration occurs in Julius Caesar, when Messala finds the body of Cassius and tells Titinius he will ‘go to meet / The noble Brutus, thrusting this report / Into his ears; I may say “thrusting” it; / For piercing steel, and darts envenomed, / Shall be as welcome to the ears of Brutus / As tidings of this sight’; another is when Hamlet apprises his mother of the truth about her first husband’s murder, and she responds, ‘these words like daggers enter in my ears’ JC 5.3.73–8; Ham. 3.4.95).

Aural vulnerability is presented as more physical in the comedies, where it is common for characters to get a ‘box of the ear’. Portia describes her Scottish suitor as having ‘borrowed a box of the ear of the Englishman’ in The Merchant of Venice (1.2.80). Shakespeare and his audiences clearly enjoyed the joke of alluding to this sort of ‘rough music’ as if it were also a type of discourse. In Measure for Measure Escalus proposes to Elbow that ‘if he took you a box o’ the ear, you might have your action of slander too’, while in The Comedy of Errors Dromio of Ephesus describes the beating he receives from his master in the same terms: ‘he told me his mind upon mine ear: / Beshrew his hand, I scarce could understand it’ (MM 2.1.175; Err. 2.1.49–50). Falstaff consoles the Lord ChiefJustice after similar treatment: ‘For the

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